


i breathe disaster

by arahir



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-18 10:54:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16993701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arahir/pseuds/arahir
Summary: After the wedding, Keith leaves Earth in search of something he can keep.“Is that a tattoo?” Shiro asks, voice distant to his own ears. It isn't, but he has to ask.The man sees through him. ”No,” he says simply, and repeats, “I’m sorry.”





	i breathe disaster

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [я дышу непоправимым](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17011002) by [timmy_failure](https://archiveofourown.org/users/timmy_failure/pseuds/timmy_failure)



> **WARNING: This fic contains spoilers for the final season of Voltron.** It's more angsty than the fic I usually write so please read the tags!! I waited to publish this in the hopes that it wouldn't surprise anyone who hadn't been spoiled yet. I hope that worked.

The wedding is held in spring, because that's when weddings are supposed to be held. Good weather, a few flowers trying their best to peak up out of the rock outside the Garrison, and it’s almost a year to the day from the end of the war. Shiro's always been the marrying type. Of course, he’s the one that asks—but he asks Keith first.

“Do you think he'd say yes?”

They're in the hangar after hours. It's dark, but the stars are bright. There’s not enough light to see the MFEs and hoverbikes by, but that's not really the point. Keith is a shadow beside him, static in stillness.

“Yeah,” he says after a breath. “Who wouldn't?”

Keith's settled into himself, into calmness and quiet decisions. Shiro trusts him, so Shiro listens. He asks three nights later in the cafeteria without pomp or circumstance, because if he waits he’ll lose his nerve.

He’s right, it turns out. Keith is right. Neither of them have a mark and somehow that makes it easier to ask and commit. Adam didn't have one either, though sometimes Shiro wonders if he did, before the end. If he woke up one day with some stranger's name stamped across his neck or elbow, but it's a useless thought, so he lets it go.

Sometimes he wonders if Keith has one, but that's useless, too.

Shiro asks him to be best man, but Keith declines with the excuse that speeches aren't his thing. He's got a point. Iverson is happy to stand in, anyway, and then Coran insists on walking him down the aisle—though it's less an aisle and more a particular arrangement of all the cafeteria chairs they could scrounge up and set outside. Lance makes a joke about Pidge playing flower girl and she punches him in the arm for it.

The day of is perfection. The only clouds are high and puffed like cotton candy and though Earth’s a hub now, the old pollution haze is gone and the horizon is burning clear as afternoon slides to evening. It's standing room only because friends and family is a little nebulous when you’ve been across most of the universe.

The front is reserved for the team. They clean up nice. Hunk looks effortlessly handsome, Lance does something with his hair that makes it look a little rakish, and Pidge insists on donning a suit so they’ll all match. Keith—

Keith looks unreal.

The ponytail hanging over his hard-set shoulders, the cast of his brow and the arch of his neck make him look like the hero from a novel about swords and honor, and maybe he is that more than Shiro would like to admit. He’s hoverbikes and sass and the number of times Shiro has caught him raiding the officer’s lounge kitchen at two in the morning is a little shocking, but he’s also this. This, more and more.

He draws Shiro’s eye twice during the ceremony. The first time, it’s the nerves and Keith’s eyes are dead steady. Shiro borrows a little of it for himself and breathes and says his piece without a stutter.

The second time is after the kiss, when there’s confetti and cheering and chaos. Keith is the conspicuous eye of it. His arms are folded across his chest and he’s staring at something in the distance. Shiro’s eyes follow his gaze to the horizon, but there’s nothing there but the first star, rising in the wake of the sunset that’s still scattering across them all.

It lights up Keith’s eyes, his face set in perfect stillness. A little breeze teases his bangs and Shiro somehow knows what’s going to happen next.

 

* * *

 

“I'm leaving,” Keith says, soft as a song.

His tuxedo jacket is already unbuttoned. The shirt underneath is unsanctioned. Shiro hadn’t realized. It’s one of the Blade’s undershirts. This was planned, but how long in advance is anyone’s guess.

Shiro searches for a word to say that isn’t _why_ and then searches his mind for an answer and gets stuck on reliving the last two days and then the last week and last month and every interaction, every look, every hint that this was coming. It feels like dejavu and it takes him a moment to remember why. This isn’t the bridge of the Castleship and the team isn’t behind him this time and he’s fully himself this time, but it feels the same. Keith, off on some mission, gone for months, and then _gone_.

It was months without word. _Still on mission,_ Kolivan told them, but he couldn’t say where or when he’d be back or how to get in touch with him. Eventually, Shiro had stopped asking.

He’s quiet for too long. Keith takes a step toward him. “I know you can hold down the fort without me, but—” Keith reaches down and pulls something out of the pouch on his belt. It’s a communicator, but one of the old Altean tech ones. Shiro didn’t know they had any of them left. Keith must see his question, because he smiles and says, “I picked it up on a swap moon, if you can believe it. Here.”

He holds it out to Shiro and Shiro… Shiro is frozen. It’s too fast and too strange and there’s at least one or a hundred conversations more he wanted to have with Keith though he can’t remember what any of them were now that his time is spinning out. “When are you going?” Shiro asks instead.

Keith’s face does something strange, an expression that’s too fast to catch before it settles pack to implacable ease. He reaches up and scratches at the back of his neck, nervous. “Tonight.”

“ _Tonight,_ ” Shiro repeats for him. It’s scoffing, by accident, only because it’s too much to take in at that moment. He tries for something kinder. “You’re—you’re leaving tonight?”

Keith swallows and nods.

“Is it a mission?”

“No.” Keith’s face shifts again, and this time Shiro can catch the edge of the expression he’s trying not to make. It’s not a happy one. “It’s just—time.” With a move that has none of his usual grace, he reaches out and takes Shiro’s human hand. He presses the circle of metal into the palm of it, motion a little frantic, a little too hard. “And if—if you ever need me, if you ever need anything, call.”

Something in his words, in his expression is wrong. He’s always been a horrid liar. “Keith…” _You're scaring me,_ he doesn’t say. He tries to make his words light, but they can’t be. He tries to make it the Captain’s voice, and it can’t be that, either. The question that trips off his tongue is too honest and he regrets it as soon as he hears it. “Are you coming back?”

Keith’s eyes get wide. “No—it’s not like that. It’s just for a little while.”

The worst liar. He’s the worst liar.

It’s a moment that later Shiro will run over in his head like a home video, watch and rewind and start over, play backward piece by piece and pause on each part, because the next thing Keith says is out of order and out of context. There’s some way it fits, but it’s years before he figures it out.

“I love you,” Keith says. He sounds it out like a promise and then squeezes Shiro's hand and repeats it, stronger: “I love you.”

Shiro’s heard the words before from him but not like this, not as a consolation prize. He steps away then, pulls his hand off Shiro's and when he says, “Goodbye,” the word takes all the heat in the hall with it, and all the air in his lungs.

He's not coming back.

 

* * *

 

It's a truth Shiro lives with and lies with. It sits next to him in bed at night, warm body on one side, ghost on the other. _He's gone,_ it whispers. _And you'll never see him again. And everything you were and everything you had, the team you built, this grand dream is rusting and hollow._

Second in command, right hand man. The thoughts seem foolish now. How many years were they a team? Two, three, and parts he wasn’t even himself. Parts, Keith was gone—and gone longer, he realizes. Gone long enough to be his own person and grow and outgrow so much. He keeps turning down hallways, expecting to see a head of dark hair or the tail of a wolf dipping just out of sight.

The love is what haunts him. In a hundred ways he could explain to himself Keith’s absence, but not the love. It’s nothing he’s earned and now it’s loss shouldn’t feel like an open wound. That's a bad night. He quells it in the morning, rolls into warm arms, lists every good thing he still has, and calls it a win.

And anyway, Keith will be back. He still tells himself that, sometimes.

After two months, he checks in with Krolia. She frowns over the projected image in the Atlas’s viewscreen. The last she heard, she says, he was six systems into a quadrant they barely have maps of. One of the last to resist Galra control, one of the last to fall to it, one of the last to be freed. And freedom is no hard and fast concept, they’ve found.

It’s dangerous, but Keith can handle dangerous, even if he’s not in a Lion anymore.

“No wormhole?” he asks, remembering the long, long months of slow flight back to Earth.

Krolia smiles. “No,” she says. “He's looking for something.”

 

* * *

 

Leaving isn’t a choice so much as a failsafe he hadn't realized was written into the heart of him until it's too late to fight. It starts somewhere around the first date. He hears about it second hand and then spends the night sleeping in Black Lion's cockpit with a bottle of something smooth heating his belly. It crystallizes the night Shiro shows him the wedding bands. He makes plans, quiet like, withdraws money and finds a decent ship with a subwarp to buy cheap.

By the time he makes good on it, the decision has lived so long in him it almost doesn't feel like a good bye. He leaves after the wedding, before the confetti’s settled and the party’s still in full swing. He considers balling up the white tux and burning it for fuel and pain in the ship's engine, but leaves it folded as best he knows how on the foot of his borrowed Garrison bed instead.

The wolf helps him pack in record time. There’s not much—a spare set of clothes, the knife, a photo folded under his belt, everything they might need until he gets somewhere worth stopping. Shiro and all thoughts of him, he brings, too, but he pushes them around and away like a kid playing with a plate of something they're too full to eat. For years, Shiro's filled up his silence. Now, it's empty quiet and the thud of his heart and the string of pain that winds up and through his ribs, twists around his bones and lungs.

He can outrun it. If he can’t, there’s one last shot he has left to blow.

 

—

 

The clone facility is gone, but that's the first place he looks when he knows what he needs to do.

There's nothing on the planet, not even bones to gather and bury. The falling rubble left a crater and the sand buried what was left. Only shards of metal remain, poking through the sand here and there like the spires of some lost and forgotten city—and every person in it the same.

Except, he realizes, for himself. He would have been buried there with them. There are worse places to rest and it’s quiet there. Keith kneels, feels the residual heat from the setting sun ease through the ground to his bare skin. His mind tries to stray, as it always does, but he eases it back from the brink of realization. There are some things not worth the cost of facing and he's been running from that fight, that one fight, for too long to know how to stop.

The back of his neck burns where his hair’s fallen over his shoulders. He only lets himself stay there as long as it takes to gather his breath, and then he leaves the wolf to guard the ship and goes hunting. The two other facilities on the planet itself are well hidden. One, he has to cut through rusted metal and caked sand to get inside, and once he does, it's clear the rust isn't a front. It was always a longshot there would be anything left after years without use.

It's not about finding him, anyway, he tells himself. It's about saving him, if there's something left to save, because Keith doesn't know how not to be a tireless devotee for this one cause.

The second facility is carved out of rock. The door is clean and when he lays his hand on the control panel, it lights up in red and doesn’t open and his blood rises in his chest. He cuts his way into it, same as the first, though it takes longer and by the time he’s through, the sweat of the work has his hair matted to his head.

Inside, the temperature drop steals his breath. The facility lights up for him against its will. It’s familiar like a bad dream he’s had a hundred times. Without meaning to, he half turns back to the door as he moves down the hallway and expects to see a figure standing there, lit in violet and violence.

There’s no one.

Every new turn, every new elevator, his heart starts going faster. He crushes the hope that tries to rise. It’s nothing to hope for, he tells himself, but it stops working when he gets to the third level. It’s the last and while the first two were clinical and lined with medical detritus, but this one is empty and the hallway feels like the entrance to a tomb or a temple.

The end doesn’t light up when he gets to it. In the dark, with only the small lights scattered through the room reflecting off his sword, the figure in the tube looks like a ghost. It’s something he’s imagining, until the moment he reaches out to touch it, and then with a shock and a hum it flickers to life.

Shiro—or something like him.

He's whole. He's terrible. There are lines of scar over his hips and shoulders, from what Keith can't imagine, but then he recalls the other facility, the hundreds and thousands of bodies made from nothing. Everything needs a source. The only sign his right arm is borrowed is the line of scar around his bicep.

Keith slams the release on the tank so hard it almost shatters, cracks splintering up the console as the tank drains and then the glass slides up. Shiro stays in position, perfect in rest, eyes closed.

He's young, or this body is. Stasis hasn't aged him. His hair is still dark, through and through, his face unlined from pain and war, and beautiful, but every version of him is. Keith leans in, ignores the wet tang of the fluid that smells like blood and ozone rising off Shiro’s skin, and presses his mouth to wet lips. He breathes life into the body and tries not to think about white hair or sunset gatherings or what a kiss looks like at a distance.

One, two, three breaths is what it takes. The chest under his hands shudders and Keith pulls back, catches him as he starts to fall. He coughs up the last of the fluid against Keith's chest and then leans back and looks up.

His voice is the sweetest when he says Keith's name.

 

* * *

 

There's a common memory, it seems—between all the clones, a shared bank. Keith doesn’t know how much this one will remember, assumes it’ll be nothing or maybe everything up until the arm was lost and remade into this.

It’s more. After they get back to his little ship and after Keith helps him into the shower and after he’s settled into the one bunk, Shiro blinks at him and reaches out with the hand Keith is used to being cold and metal. His skin is soft from lack of use, but the scar tissue over Keith’s cheek is numb to the touch of it and he can’t feel it as more than a deep pressure.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro says.

Keith presses into the touch without meaning to. It’s instinctual. He’s missed this. Words rush through him, stutter on his tongue, stop and start, and then the hand pulls back and something catches his gaze. The mark on the back of it—strange until he can tease its meaning, and then the right words come on their own.

“I love you.”

“I know,” Shiro says.

But he doesn’t. This isn’t a choice, Keith realizes. This is his last chance, his _only_ chance. It was the only one he ever had. “No,” Keith whispers into the space between them and pushes forward, presses his lips against Shiro’s for the second time in a day and a lifetime. He makes it soft and makes it long and takes from it everything he’ll need for the rest of his life.

Shiro’s hands come back to grip at the back of his head. Keith pulls away to stifle the hitch in his throat and then pushes his forehead against Shiro’s and breathes and breathes.

 

* * *

 

They don’t talk about what Keith left behind. It’s null and void. If Shiro needs him, the communicator is hooked to the belt across Keith’s chest, right beside the knife, right beside his heart. It will work anywhere in the universe, but the light on its back stays dull and dark and it never makes a sound.

The memories start to write themselves over in his head. There was a hand on his shoulder, heavy and steady, a feature of his life for years, and now it shifts. The hand on his shoulder slides to wrap loose around the back of his neck, part the hair there, make room for the steady, wet press of a kiss. It’s a little benediction, every time, a promise.

Keith lives for it.

This isn’t Shiro. Not really. Or—it's him, but with a little bend and twist, a shadow of the man he remembers from that place between places when all things fell apart around them.

In a backwater bar at what feels like the edge of the galaxy, they grab dinner and a room. It's dark and grimy and Keith likes it for the way he knows they won't run into anyone they know and the way that the pleasure of good company makes up for the rest. Krolia keeps him in the loop of who’s where and what’s going on. If she has questions, she never asks.

The Garrison and the team by association are concerned with the Coalition and Earth politics. The generals are off on a diplomatic mission—no accounting for Kolivan's taste there—and the one thing Keith can be certain of is that no one is trying to kowtow or make nice with whoever is in charge of this one-town moon.

It's a good place to get lost. He's not embarrassed and he's not trying to hide what he has, but he doesn't want to explain himself yet. He wants this, for no reason than that he can.

Across the bar, a Galra tries to catch his eye. He has long ears, a thin face, and maybe he's attractive. There was a time he tried to notice, tried to clue in, right after Shiro started bringing his plus one to the team’s weekly outings and anything seemed better than the hollow spot in his gut. Now, it doesn’t matter. Shiro sees the smile, leans into him then, sets a hand high on Keith's thigh and slides it higher so Keith has to spread his legs.

“Ready to go up?” he asks, voice heavy. The Galra turns back to his drink.

Keith nods and rises, Shiro's hand falling away as he does, but not before it tightens. Heat fills Keith's face and body.

He's new to this, still. The first time made him ache, not because it hurt, but because he wanted it, and somehow Shiro did, too. It hurt to wonder if maybe he'd been brave, said the right thing, said it fast enough and true enough, there might have been a chance

When he cried, it was for loss, but it was for how good it felt, too.

Now, Shiro pulls him upstairs and presses him into the wall in the hallway outside their rented room. The kiss is molten. He pushes a thigh been Keith's legs until he’s on the tips of his toes and Keith has to break away to beg and whisper, “Not here.”

Shiro likes it when he begs. This Shiro does. He likes to press his face to Keith's neck and bite. He likes to see how much of his hands he can get around Keith's hip and what sounds he can shock out of him in pleasure and he likes it most when Keith hooks a leg over him and flips their positions. He waits until Shiro has him on the bed, shirt pushed up to Keith’s under arms, the rest of him bare for Shiro as he kisses down his chest. Keith pulls him back up and then it’s one quick motion to have Shiro on his back on the bed instead. Shiro laughs at him. It feels like years since Keith's heard it.

“You're heavy,” he says, smile glowing in the dark.

“Get used to it.” Keith resettles his hips—and rises like a shot when Shiro groans. “Sorry, I—”

Shiro's hands settle on his hips and then slide to his thighs and down, cupping around the backs of his knees, holding him there. “No. It’s good.”

Everything between them is.

He likes Keith's hair long, too. There was a time Keith thought Shiro would, but maybe—maybe it was never the right style. Maybe he was never the right physique, the right piece to the puzzle Shiro needed filled. There was a time he was sure he was.

His Shiro teases the tie off his hair and runs the fingers of his marked hand through it before he pulls Keith back down into a kiss. It’s a warm night and the sounds from the bar down below filter up to them to fill the silence between the sounds they make. There’s nothing else in that moment. No Earth, no old pain to nurse, no loneliness.

He wonders if this time, he'll be able to keep his happiness.

 

* * *

 

Shiro has nightmares. As much of him is Shiro as Keith remembers him, enough of him is different, too. Shiro had nightmares about the Galra and the arena and those are still there, but he has new ones where he wakes up in terror and pain, hands like claws, back arched. Keith teaches himself how to soothe it away, when to touch and when to go and get a glass of cold water to leave within reach on the cargo box they shoved next to their shared bed.

It's indulgent to keep a cold box on a ship like theirs, but it's worth it.

Their idiosyncrasies are hard to keep track of. In close quarters, they magnify out of proportion. Keith knows all his flaws. He's too quiet and he doesn't remember to put the lids back on their vacuum sealed tupperware in their little galley and it's always easier to let the wolf teleport them outside than open the door— _it's not a big deal, Shiro, stop screaming_ —but what he's worst at is knowing when a conversation is overdue.

In a port, they catch a replay of the wedding on a projector in the corner. They don't mean to, but it's playing and there's nothing better to stare at when you've been standing in the same customs line for two hours.

By the time Keith notices, it’s too late to hide it, too late to distract. The clip is short: ten seconds on repeat, crisp tuxedos and a kiss. They’re bright like stars. Keith is barely visible in the background behind Shiro’s shoulder, arms folded, eyes off and away.

Shiro blinks up at the screen, looks back to him, and then back to the feed, and then whispers, “Oh, Keith.”

He knows the team is alive. Keith told him that much. He knows they’re on Earth, safe and well, and he never asked Keith why he would leave them to rescue one clone left to decay on a desert planet, but maybe he should have.

No—Keith should have told him.

It wasn’t something he could hide forever, but he wasn’t sure how to explain it. He loves Shiro without condition, even there, even on that feed, even in that moment. He loves Shiro in that dirty customs waiting room, too. That’s the star that guided him through dark hours and maybe it’s young and foolish, maybe it’s naive, maybe this was always destined to go poorly, but he can’t stop himself from loving.

“Sorry,” he offers.

Shiro searches his face another moment and then sighs and pulls him in with both arms around his shoulders. Keith’s nose presses to the hollow of his throat, where the scarf Shiro’s taken to wearing bunches up. He closes his eyes and breathes in the smell and heat of that body, lets the coil of pain in his chest ease a little.

They’ll have to talk about it, but later. Later he’ll confess the whole thing, cry about it, get it out from start to finish with every mistake he made illustrated in exquisite detail, and Shiro will hold him through it and soothe it away like Keith soothes his nightmares. For that moment, it’s enough to let it be. Nothing is pressing in on them—no rush of war and chaos, no duty to hold to. It’s a small life, but a good one, and he’s not so naive to think the world won’t call him back sooner than later.

He’s earned this. They both have.

 

* * *

 

Keith comes back to Earth a year and a day after he left, in quiet fashion.

Shiro knows because it’s an event that’s tied to his anniversary for all time, and they have a good one. Nice restaurants are hard to come by in the post-Galra Earth, but there are one or two and they have a perfect meal and better night.

The life they’ve built is calm in the Garrison’s shadow. It’s not the feeling of the Atlas’s first transformation or the Black Lion showing him another world or the astral plane coming alive for the first time in an age with the presence of someone he can speak to and touch. That’s not his life anymore. His joys are less triumphant, but still good.

Keith’s return rattles that. It’s not by his choice. Not really. The Coalition meeting is all hands on deck and it’s Shiro’s anniversary, but it’s also the second since the end of the chaos they refer to nebulously as the War. They can’t do a celebration with four paladins. It wouldn’t be right, and Allura’s absence is already a glaring thing in this new world. He knows in a nebulous sense that the return is coming, but it’s somehow still a shock to get the notification that Keith’s ship has touched down.

He doesn’t park in the hangar, though they’ve left room. Later, Shiro will understand why, but at that moment it seems odd only in passing.

They meet in the makeshift reception hall by the front entrance. Keith greets him with a full-body hug that Shiro holds a moment too long. His shoulders are solid and his back is more muscled, still lithe. When he pulls back, there’s a bit of a tan on his cheeks. His hair is longer, too, and his eyes brighter than Shiro remembers them being in that year after the war. Shiro spends so long looking he almost misses the figure behind Keith.

The man has a cloak over his head and a scarf across the bottom of his face. It’s almost comical, but with the mishmash of newcomers converging on Earth and the Garrison, he’s not out of place. Something about his stance looks familiar, though Shiro can’t place it. Keith doesn’t introduce him and Shiro doesn’t ask. The implication is unavoidable, anyway, and more so when Keith accepts the offer of a Garrison room for the occasion with one bed and one bed only.

Shiro hears whispers about it between the staff that night, but he knew that truth already by the hand the man pressed to the small of Keith’s back. It was an inevitable development in their lives, though it still shakes them a little. Everywhere Keith is, the man follows like a shadow. He and Kosmo and Keith make quite the trio and if Keith was untouchable before, now he’s a unit unto his own. It’s sweet to see him happy, but bitter in some other way Shiro can’t put a face to.

The rest of the team isn’t so magnanimous about it. At breakfast the next day, Lance tries to drag a name out of the man and then out of Keith. They remain stubborn and silent.

“He doesn’t talk,” Keith says finally, though it’s a lie to get the heat off since Shiro saw them whispering together before breakfast.

He wants to know what kind of a person can catch Keith's eye and keep it. _Is this what you were looking for out there_? he wonders. Keith’s leaving never stopped hurting, somehow, but to know this was why he left hurts in a newer, sharper way.

They don’t get a whisper out of the man before the ceremony that day, and even then, he stands in the back, a silent specter. His presence speaks for him.

Krolia seems to know him. She nods to him when she takes a seat and Kosmo keeps close company at the man's side through it all. One of the family, Shiro realizes a little bleakly, and all this happened in a year.

All throughout his speech, he can feel eyes burning on him. He doesn’t have to search the crowd to know who it is, but he can’t help it. Shiro makes his speech and through every word he can feel eyes burning on him, or at the spot over his shoulder where Keith is standing tall in his red and white and gold and black. Shiro isn’t sure which option is less comfortable, but then stutters on a line when he realizes the latter shouldn’t be. They all good in the new uniforms. That’s the point. The feeling roiling in his gut is unidentifiable and growing by the second. He pushes it from his mind with the foreboding sense that it won’t end with the speech.

As if to confirm it, the man nods up at him as Shiro winds down and the applause starts ringing out. His hood is mostly off now and though his hair is close-cropped, Shiro knows why the man looks familiar now. It’s almost funny, like a bad joke. They lock eyes and then the man turns to the pillars of rock in the distance and slips away.

A conversation is coming. He’ll never be ready to have it.

 

* * *

 

There’s a spot in the desert he used to ride out to when he needed to think.

Keith is busy handing out handshakes and showing off Kosmo to the new cadets. The sun is near to setting and it feels like all their best moments have had the same light. Shiro watches him a moment and then makes his excuses to Iverson and Sam and heads to the hangar.

Quiet steals over Shiro’s mind and heart as he rides out. His unbuttoned uniform jacket whips behind him, dust and sunlight streaming in his wake. He can see it out of the corner of his eye, limning the edge of the goggles. It feels too real and somehow still like a dream. It gives him time to think.

Keith is a runner. It was by sheer and shared will that Shiro kept him at the Garrison and the piece everyone missed about that was that Shiro could do it, because Shiro knew how to run, too. He’s amazing at it—but it doesn’t look like running if you’re chasing something at the same time.

This, he realizes, as he pulls up the bike on the same hill of rock he’s watched the sunset from a hundred times, was him running. Keith ran, but Shiro went first. The chase lasted for years and he was always two steps ahead of Keith, until he wasn’t. The _I love you_ haunted him for weeks after, like something precious he couldn’t put down but was scared of breaking.

It was too comfortable, too easy. Keith ran him to ground and made it look effortless.

Four times, he woke up from the edge of death with Keith’s face before him and Keith’s hands on him. In a desert shack and lying on the ground on some nameless planet and inside a pod with images of Keith playing behind his eyes—and right there, on that hardpan desert right below them with Sendak bleeding in the sand a few feet away. It was as if there was some spell Keith could cast to keep him there, some prayer he could use to whisper Shiro back from death, a touch and a word to bind him to life in body and soul.

It was beautiful and it made his stomach twist with too many emotions he didn’t know how to put a word to. It was too much for one body to hold, sometimes. It bewitched and it terrified, but however good Keith was, he could never best Shiro in a race.

Shiro took the first out he could.

The man turns to him when he parks the bike. His hood is off and the scarf is down. It’s a face he knows, but he hasn’t seen it in years. The man smiles a little and huffs, “This is weird.”

 _Weirder than everything else?_ Shiro wants to ask, but it’s the last in a long line of questions he hasn’t had time to go over. The realization is still dawning on him, the reverse of the sunset that’s lighting up the man’s dark hair like a fire. It makes a strange sense. There were clones of him by the hundred—what's one more? Keith told him how far he would go to save him and Shiro remembers that part, remembers Keith giving all to save one version of him when thousands more were dying all around him.

What he and this man have in common is simple luck—and Keith.

When he waits too long to speak, the man fills the silence with a question of his own. “Are you happy?” he asks casually, as if they're old friends and he's asking about Shiro's day.

Shiro nods, knee-jerk. “Yeah. I mean—it’s not always a ball game, but yeah. Of course.” Running the Coalition is like herding cats and it’s worse without Allura there to back him up. It’s worse without Keith. He thumbs the ring on his left hand absently. “Are you?” It feels like a ridiculous question. It’s not a contest, and that’s not why he asks, but it’s his way of getting two answers at once: _Are you happy?_ and: _Is he?_

The man pauses half a moment and then smiles wide enough that it wrinkles his forehead and cheeks. “Yeah,” he says. “We’re happy.”

It feels like Shiro is looking at some divergent timeline, some lost possibility that’s spun off without him, the threads of it left fraying and drifting around him. “Why bring me out here?”

The man frowns and for the first time he can’t meet Shiro’s gaze. “I wanted to show you something… I’m sorry.”

The apology doesn’t make sense until he steps forward. He teases the glove off his right hand, exposing the back.

It’s flesh, which is the first surprise, but the implication doesn’t hit for a moment. It's marked, too, in crosshatched red lines, long and short, deft but messy. For a moment, Shiro mistakes it for a wound, but the red is too vibrant. It’s the color of a candy or a red evening sky. As he looks, the man raises his hand and flips it so the mark is right side up and now, Shiro can make out the order in it.

A word. A single word. A name that Shiro knows like a favorite song. It looks like it's been written over a half a dozen times, in haste, clumsily, with too heavy a hand.

It's beautiful.

“Is that a tattoo?” Shiro asks, voice distant to his own ears. It isn't, but he has to ask.

The man sees through him. ”No,” he says simply, and repeats, “I’m sorry.”

Shiro blinks as his stomach falls and falls and then rises and rises until it nearly chokes him. “How long?”

“I don't know.”

The entire time, then. Maybe from the moment he lost the arm. Maybe that was the day Keith left the Garrison and started looking for the Lion, putting together the clues that would lead him to Shiro for the first of a dozen perfect coincidences.

Coincidence. No. The name on his hand is proof it never was.

Shiro steps away because those eyes are going to bore into him and he already has a headache starting to rush and pound through the back of his skull like a hammer beating a knife out of dullness. He didn’t have a mark on that arm. He didn’t have a mark anywhere. It was a defect of his illness, proof that he would only get what he fought for in life, before it was taken from him—but that's not how it works.

The mark is what you need it to be, when you need it most, and then it's written in your blood and in the stars. It can't be undone—not even in parting, not even in death.

Shiro walks to the edge of the little outcrop, feeling every rock crush underfoot. The wind against his face stings his eyes.

“Does he have one?”

This is what he promised himself he wouldn’t ask. Anything about Keith. Anything about their life. It’s half respect, half not wanting to know, and some small amount because he needed to, because it’s been killing him from the moment Keith landed that he suddenly didn’t know this person who once knew him better than anyone. Once he opens that bag, he’s done for.

His own face flinches at him, at the question, but then softens to kindness. “Yeah,” he says after a moment. “He does.” He reaches up with the marked hand and taps the back of his neck. “Right there. I think that’s why he keeps his hair long...” The answer sounds like an apology somehow. “He misses you, you know. We don’t spend much time around Earth, but—”

He cuts himself off. Shiro doesn't know why until he feels the expression on his face. It's twisted. This isn't something he wants to know. He needs to, like he needs every detail of Keith's life now that he knows it was supposed to be his, too, but that's lost to him. He doesn't want to know the breadth of that loss. And anyway—

“I'm happy here.” He fingers his wedding ring again and pastes on a smile. “I'm glad he has this. I'm glad he has you.”

The words taste like sand, the cadence of them a beat off key. He must be stupid, he realizes, to think he can lie to himself twice over. His own face looks back at him and his own lips crook on a smile. There’s something different about the eyes. They’re a different shade, deep down in the pupil, and almost seem to reflect the light.

“He’s mine,” the man says clear as a bell, without possession or accusation. “He’s mine, but he’d do anything for you. You have to realize that.”

Shiro waits until the words stuck in his throat loosen. “Even now?”

The man reaches out and presses the palm of his hand over Shiro’s chest and over the pocket sewn to the inside of the uniform and the circle of metal that’s been there since the day Keith gave it to him. Shiro feels his eyes widen, but there’s no real question how the man knows.

“Even now.”

Shiro stays there long after the man leaves him. After twilight, when the stars are all risen and even the band of the Milky Way is visible overhead, a ship takes off in the distance like a shooting star in reverse streaking up and away. For the first time in a year, he can’t lie to himself that he’s happy with two feet on the ground. For the first time in a year, the ring around his finger feels more a weight than a safety line.

For the first time in a year, he lets himself dream about the stars and that rise-and-soar in his gut whenever he broke the atmosphere and the pure rush of knowing there was someone right on his tail—someone that could catch him, keep up, race ahead, meet him at the finish every time with the same smile and tease.

 

* * *

 

He makes it a year and a day before he breaks. Keith picks up on the first ring.

**Author's Note:**

> Bea did some incredible art for this which you can find on [twitter](https://twitter.com/tartepit/status/1063851278344826880) and [tumblr](https://tarte-pit.tumblr.com/post/180209197777/its-a-moment-that-later-shiro-will-run-over-in) <3
> 
> You can come request fic, chat, or hate me for bad memes on [twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir), [tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com/), and [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/arahir)!!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] i breathe disaster](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17031336) by [taikodragon (hana_ginkawa)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hana_ginkawa/pseuds/taikodragon)




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